Why Google's hiring process is broken

I often ask a similar question such as "Your top 5 languages". It does not negatively affect the interviewee, it just helps me target my questions better.

Though if you say that you are a 10 but perform at a 5, then who knows, it could affect you negatively as my expectations are set high at that point! :)

Microsoft had the same problem in the late 90s, though I wouldn't want to attribute causation to that for how MS has wound up. However, I do think it provides an object lesson that the use of abstract interviewing might indicate a company that is very popular to work for but has possibly jumped the shark (or hit a plateau) businesswise.

despite the very high tech and unique looking appearance of their hiring process, it's actually very typical. It's different rather by its scalability and the extend to which it is industrialised than by its cleverness to find people's creativity and potential. It's a very well oiled machine to weed out people with a bad grasp of the fundamentals en mass rather than a tuned process to find a few shock trooper geniuses it needs.

Went through a dozen super generic interviews for a generic engineer role. Got a good feedback but ended up finding out that the role was filled before my case was presented to the hiring committee and that even though the interviews were generic, they try to use the results to fill one chosen position only. I needed to restart the entire process and do more generic interviews to try for another generic role in one particular opening.

I just posted a comment about it elsewhere in this thread, but let me list my gripes here, in order of decreasing annoyance. This was actually for an internship, but for a PhD-seeking grad student who can code (me).

(1) I had a deadline to accept/deny with another company, and I told Google the deadline. Google asked me to get an extension, so they'd have more time to interview me. I got the extension (the other company wasn't delighted to give it to me, and I was embarassed to ask, but I did it anyway). I told Google. Then, Google never scheduled the interview for me, and I ended up just having to accept with the other company. I wrote Google to tell them I had accepted with the other company on that company's deadline, and they acknowledged my email, but did not offer an apology or explanation for making me get an extension and then not actually scheduling an interview.

(2) The process they used for me and my colleagues (grad students) was to have PhD engineers interview us as an initial filter, then to have HR people actually place us in groups. This placement process seemed pretty abysmal, for me and for everyone else. Which isn't surprising. The HR people aren't qualified to understand a student's area of research, expertise, and interest, and match them to groups. I would imagine their level of insight, as non-hackers, is basically "This student like Python, this group needs Python." In order to do this right, they need people who can actually understand the students' research and skills and the groups' needs at a much more fine-grained level.

(3) The sort-of-rudeness I experienced with HR described in #1 happened to more of my colleagues than not (in various forms). Honestly, I wonder if the HR people are just super over-worked.

Anyway, not long after this Google very publicly announced that Sergey was taking over as CEO and shaking things up to try to return the company to its roots. I was surprised by how "un-Googly" the whole recruiting process was, and I guess the company has really been struggling to maintain its culture across the board. I consider the experiences I described above to be one likely symptom/manifestation of this.

Overall I'd say I saw a combination of big company bureaucracy problems, with a "holier-than-thou" pretentious attitude that seems to allow rudeness to creep in. Their attitude is, "We know you'd die to work for us," which is just so untrue, and it'll be very hard for them to ever recruit me in the future after this experience.

Maybe Google has gone from "Don't be evil" to "Evil, but unlike other companies, we still act like can can do no wrong."